Jul 20 Check Out This Beautiful Color Grading Breakdown

Here’s something that might be interesting to all you retouchers out there. It’sa visual breakdown of the color grading process that went into a short videoclip.

I’m extremely fascinated by the growing parallels between retouchers andcolorists. Traditionally, the role of the colorist has been one built around colorcorrection and color grading. Now, as grading software gets more robust andmore affordable, the expectations of the colorist are increasing as well.Interestingly, the skillsets of a colorist and a retoucher are becoming moreand more similar.

I shot the above clip myself, using some techniques familiar to anyone versedin basic composite photography. Shot on the RED Scarlet MX, I exposed thefirst scene to get the most detail and latitude out of the camping trailer. Asexpected, the sky blew out. So I shot another take - this time, panningupwards and exposing for the sky.

I brought my footage into Davinci Resolve, and from there it was a ratherstraightforward process of masking out the foreground and overlaying themask on top of the shot of the sky. Then it was basically a step by stepprocess of matching exposure and color, and finally, grading and stylising theimage.

The main difference in the colorist’s workflow is, of course, motion. Everythingup until this point was done on a single frame of the video. From there I usedvarious tracking techniques within Resolve to interpret the motion of the clip,and applied that motion tracking data to my mask. I had to manually keyframe the odd glitch here and there.

For me, this was predominantly a practice exercise. As the skills that arefundamental for retouchers are becoming more and more valuable for acolorist to have